I think it’s fair to say college students as a breed understand the art of screwing around. We most always have something better we should be doing, but sometimes you need to go to Facebook and find out what music the person you’re stalking likes to listen to.

It’s also well known that college students like to stay up late. Sleep or, rather, the absence of it, is a topic entrenched in the mind. I read a book last year about a prison in communist Germany that would torture its captives not by inflicting pain, but by leaving the lights on 24 hours a day. In movies, people’s consciences cause insomnia, and countless songs document the torment of lovelorn singers losing sleep over estranged lovers. Sleep means so much more than just closing your eyes. It’s repose and escape. It’s something I don’t get enough of.

My evenings are a constant battle between my common sense (“Lindsay, you’re tired, it’s time for bed”) and my ridiculousness (“It’s 3 a.m., I’m ready for bed, but I kinda want to see what the fall Marc Jacobs’ line looks like”). I rarely have a good reason for staying up, so it’s my own fault that I sleep through phone calls, alarm clocks and earthquakes. (That last one was when I was 10, but it’s a fairly lifelong problem — and damn, when I’m gone, I’m gone.) I wear myself out doing unnecessary things. A trip to the bathroom to brush my teeth turns into me testing out a faux-hawk and deciding if it’s a hairstyle that I can swing. When I was little, I’d write excessively long journal entries to avoid going to bed (which essentially is what I’m doing right now with this column, at 3 in the morning).

I blame it on all those proverbs that tell you not to put off until tomorrow what you can do today. But I don’t actually get anything of value accomplished; I just waste time until I feel it’s too late to sufficiently start anything that might require a book, my eyes and them being open. I have seemingly translated the idiom to mean that you can’t go to bed until you can’t possibly do anything more for the evening, so it has to be put off until tomorrow because of logistics, not because of a defeatist attitude. As a result, Red Bull has replaced coffee, since I still have to wake up for classes.

While physically it’s a bitch to function without sleep, mentally it can be even tougher. Late at night, my mind is my own worst enemy. Thinking leads to pondering regrets and second-guessing myself. Hypothetical questions seem strangely urgent. Do I really need to know what position I would put my hands in if they had to be frozen like that forever? No, but I think about it anyway.

Sometimes I feel like those sleep-deprived prisoners, but it’s a self-inflicted condition. I’m the bane to my own well-rested existence because I allow my brain free range. I’ve been trying to avoid thinking at night though — hence this week’s column.

Communication junior Lindsay Sakraida is the PLAY editor. She can be reached at [email protected].